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Saturday, November 24, 2012

Multiple sex oﬀence trial rocks Australia

Manny Waks

SYDNEY — Another major Jewish organization in Australia is embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal, adding to the trauma triggered by recent revelations of similar cases involving students at two schools in Melbourne, run by Chabad and Adass Israel, respectively.

Because of a suppression order issued by an Australian court, the name of the organization, the alleged sexual abuser and the alleged victims cannot be disclosed.

The Forward can, however, reveal that a man faced Melbourne Magistrates Court on more than 25 counts of child sex abuse, including indecent acts with a minor and sexual intercourse with a child.

Despite the involvement of the unnamed Jewish organization in the case, the defendant is not believed to be Jewish. He entered a “not guilty” plea and is scheduled to face court again in December, with a trial date expected to be set for next year.

The alleged sexual abuse is understood to have taken place during an overseas trip about a decade ago.

A representative for the Office of Public Prosecutions also confirmed to the Forward that there are multiple complainants. Not all of them are believed to be Jewish.

Manny Waks, who broke his silence last year about the alleged sexual abuse he suffered two decades ago as a student at Chabad’s Yeshivah College, in Melbourne, said: “It’s devastating to learn of the additional serious allegations of child sexual abuse and cover-up within our community. These new revelations highlight that instances of child sexual abuse are not unique to one segment within our community.”

News of this latest scandal came just days after Prime Minister Julia Gillard called for a royal commission of inquiry into the “insidious evil acts” of institutional child sexual abuse across religious denominations in Australia. Royal commissions are established in Australia when the judicial system is deemed to have failed. Although the terms of reference have yet to be finalized, they have powers of subpoena.

While the Catholic Church has borne the brunt of the media’s blowtorch, the Jewish community has been implicated since 2008, when news first broke of sexual abuse allegations against Israeli-born Malka Leifer, former principal of Melbourne’s Adass Israel girls school.

The chief rabbi of Adass, Avraham Zvi Beck, and other officials have been accused of helping Leifer flee Australia for Israel as soon as the allegations — denied by her — emerged within the tightly knit, non-Zionist, Yiddish-speaking community in 2008.

Last year, claims also emerged of alleged child sex abuse in the 1980s perpetrated on 12 Yeshivah College students, three of whom now reside in America.

David Cyprys, a former security guard contracted to the college, will stand trial next July on 41 counts of child sex abuse, including child rape. He has pleaded not guilty.

Another alleged perpetrator, David Kramer, is a former teacher at Yeshivah College, which is part of the Chabad movement’s Yeshivah Centre, in Melbourne. Kramer is awaiting extradition from America, where he was jailed in 2008 for molesting a 12-year-old boy in a St. Louis synagogue. In October, a judge in the United States approved the extradition order to Melbourne, where he is wanted by police investigating claims that he molested four boys attending Yeshivah College between 1989 and 1992.

Timmy Rubin, a Lubavitcher who runs a mikveh in Melbourne, told the Forward: “We understand why Julia Gillard made that decision, but we are nervous for certain people in our community,” she said. “Some people are really nervous because 25 years ago, they probably did the wrong thing.”

Rubin, who services some Adass women at the ritual bathhouse, added: “With Adass, the problem is that nobody pressed charges, and that’s why she got away with it. People whose daughters were mucked around with were furious, but they were scared to press charges because they didn’t want their girls to be shamed in the community — that’s the real tragedy.”

Shlomo Boruch Abelesz, a former secretary of the Adass Israel community, told the Forward, “The fact that there don’t seem to have been any abuse claims for a number of years now shows that the Jewish schools have tackled it and cleaned up their act.”

In the Yeshivah College case, it is alleged that Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the Brooklyn-born chief rabbi of Chabad in Melbourne until his death, in 2008, helped cover up allegations of child sex abuse and gave alleged perpetrators the option to flee the country or be reported to authorities.